Qualcomm wants to be the chip inside everything that replaces your smartphone, and it just announced two products to achieve that end.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said Tuesday that the company is working on more than 40 different wearable devices with AI technology — including jewelry, earbuds with cameras, studs and watches — a sign of how aggressively the chip maker is betting that the next major computing platform won’t be a phone at all.

To advance this vision, Qualcomm is announcing two new offerings: a platform called Snapdragon Reality Elite for mixed reality glasses, designed to run more powerful AI on device, and a Scalable AI Ready Toolkit (START), which is a collection of hardware modules and a software suite for AI devices, starting with smart glasses.

Compared to the previous XR platform, the new Snapdragon Reality Elite offers improvements of up to 60% in GPU performance, up to 30% in CPU performance, and up to 160% in NPU performance, according to the company. It can be difficult to put the percentage gains in chip specifications into context, but Qualcomm offers one concrete data point, saying the platform can run a 3-billion-parameter language model at a rate of 45 codes per second — fast enough for fast, responsive AI interactions. Qualcomm says the chip will also enable better head and hand tracking, along with improved vision capabilities.

Snapdragon Reality Elite supports 4.4K resolution per eye at 90 frames per second, which is a modest increase from the 4.3K resolution per eye of the

Qualcomm says the platform is designed to power two types of devices: Video Standalone Headsets (VST), which overlay digital content over a real-world camera feed, and lightweight, tethered Transparent Optical Headsets (OST), which blend digital images directly into your field of view. Among the first devices to use it: the XREAL Project Aura, which was shown off at Google I/O earlier this year, and an upcoming device from Play for Dream.

Meanwhile, the START program consists of an AR chip, a software platform, companion apps, and white-label software aimed at helping device makers get to market faster. Through the white label program, the company is offering three reference designs: an audio + camera setup similar to Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, a monocular display, and a binocular display.

Eyewear manufacturers Inspecs and O’Neill – owned by TitanFlex – will be among the first partners in the white label program. Qualcomm said START will expand beyond smart glasses to support other form factors in the future.

Amon’s statements Made for CNBCand explain the strategic logic behind both ads. As companies seek to collect more real-world data from users to power their AI agents, a new wave of hardware startups building new form factors will emerge, with big implications for established smartphone players like Apple and Samsung, he said.

“I think there will be a lot of experimentation with different form factors,” Amon said. “Right now, we have over 40 designs of these devices, and I’m telling you the types of form factors are very, very broad.” “The principle is something you wear, something (that’s) with you all the time, something that can see the world around you, so that you have context and you have the ability to reach out to an agent and talk to them,” he added.

To that end, Qualcomm is clearly positioning itself as the primary silicon layer for everything that comes after the smartphone. The white-label START program, in particular, is designed to lower barriers for new entrants.